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The Curious Affair of the Sale of a Property in France


Gb
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Back in 2021 I sold my property in the Lot which took 23 weeks from the day I entered an estate agent until the attestation de vente was signed with the notary and buyer.  On this site I posted a contemporaneous summary of a blog I maintained throughout the sale and afterwards.  The entries made here have disappeared.  However, the blog remains and has been updated with a couple of events which have occurred this year, see

https://domainesale.weebly.com

Readers visiting this forum may find it of interest although it is quite long but it does mention all the steps taken and hoops jumped through that I had to take to complete the sale, viz (not necessarily in the order they were encountered):

1.  Assistance from estate agent and notary + notary’s questions

2.  Diagnostic Technique Immobilier (DTI)

3.  Service Public de l’Assainissement Non Collectif (SPANC)

4.  Buyer’s right of retraction

5 . Property offered to Mairie for option to buy

6.  Introduction to Societe Accreditee de Representation Fiscale (SARF) - fiscal representative dealing with capital gains tax + SARF questions

7.  Dealings with propane gaz company for recovery of tank

8.  Transfer of Residency (TOR)

9.  Removal of goods and chattels

10.  UK car purchase and sale of French cars, arrangement of UK car insurance with no claims discount brought from French insurance company

11.  Comments on using foreign exchange broker for buying sterling

12.  Recovery of erroneous charge for taxe d’habitation

 

gb

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Very useful list, Gb.

I would add:

Inform the local tax office concerning taxes foncières and taxe d'habitation.

Immediately after sale is signed, call water, electricity and phone suppliers with your final meter readings. (I did this from the car park, minutes after signing away my house.)

Warn your U.K. bank that a large sum of money will be arriving, and what is is for, so they don’t suspect you of money-laundering.

Keep your French bank account going for several more months, in case there are small reimbursements trickling in from your former suppliers, or tax office.

 

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We are following a similar path to Gb and all being well should be back in the UK for the summer. We're currently in a rented house here whilst the UK house purchase goes through and this has given us time to reflect on the 10 months that it took from first putting the house on the market to finally handing over the keys to the new owners at the Notaires.

A few thoughts.

1. Choose a decent estate agent and preferably one you know and rate. We engaged two - the first was someone we have known for years who is married to the owner of a local agency, she's fully qualified and knows her stuff. The second was an agent from Leggett who is a friend of a friend, we only found out after we'd signed that she hadn't been doing the job for very long and had personal issues that meant she often had to return to the UK. 

We had a similar number of viewings from both agents and had 15 viewings in total. Within two months we had an offer from a couple introduced by the Leggett agent and after a bit of discussion we accepted their offer in July last year, that's where things started to get unpleasant and beyond stressful. Whilst the buyers were incredibly difficult the blame for this lies solely with the agent who was unprofessional throughout the process. I would therefore not advise anyone to use Leggett as the people they employ are on the whole untrained and often have little experience. 

2. Do as much as you can yourself. I organised the various diagnostics myself (fosse, DPE etc) and liaised direct with the Notaire where possible.

3. Make sure everything in the house works and the house is cleaned before the final inspection so the buyers have no reason to ask for a price reduction at the last minute, this really does happen.

4. Cancel the water and electricity etc yourself as soon as you've signed, stupidly and at her insistence we allowed the agent to do this but being the lazy lump that she is things didn't get done for several days and we ended up paying for the buyers electricity for a week.

Next stage is currency transfer and removals but that is weeks away.

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Thanks for adding your experiences so far. I hope you will follow up with a blow by blow account to finish. We are still trying to come to terms with the incompatibility of our age and the continuing work load of maintaining our home in France. I think we must sell in the next two years but it will be a wrench to give up our lovely second home and all that goes with it.

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I felt the same as you, HD, about the prospect of giving up a holiday home of 50 years.   But, in the event, it has really felt a weight off my shoulders. 

So many new rules and regulations came in;  the death knell for me was no longer being allowed to have bonfires, so having to struggle to cut up massive amounts of winter hedge prunings and convey them to the dump in a small car.

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Loiseau/Hectorsdad you have summed up the same reasons we sold our large house and massive garden in Normandy and moved to a flat in Nantes (albeit with 2 hectares of garden with paid staff!) Now we get all the advantages with non of the hard work. Several of the longer term residents have asked if we regret the decision and miss our old house.  We give the same answers, better to leave the work whilst it was still a pleasure rather than a drudge.

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L and L, clearly you have had the same wonderful experiences in France that confirm that we did the right thing in buying our secondaire. Family and friends have all benefited from it and we have gained so much from making new friends, French, Dutch and from UK. 
 We are off to France again tomorrow and we have a few jobs organised to start the long term preparation for selling. We will make sure we take full advantage of our 90/180 limit during the next few years. This limit has been a nuisance in planning the most efficient use of our time.

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With advancing age is it really necessary to OWN a property?  I  rent a more comfortable place than I could ever hope  to buy, and am no longer  responsible for repairs. The landlord even replaces the filtre on the air-conditioning.

I still have my barrel as well but it increasingly feels as if it were filled with wet sand and hung around my neck, so I am thinking of getting rid of that and just renting.

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Hello NormanH, welcome back seems an age since I last enjoyed one of your posts.  

No, its not necessary to own a property.  The new law concerning the thermal audit of buildings/follow up work in a co pro could cost individuals up to €30,000 in our area (if other experiences are to go by).  This is already causing concern in some of the older residents here.  They don't want to spend the money (if they have it).  Several have no direct family, so an increase in the value of the property does not automatically translate into an increased inheritance for a family member.

Rents here are much more tightly controlled than in the UK for example, rises in rent are governed by INSEE, then there is the 'treve".  So in principle a renter, provided they continue to pay, are fairly secure.

As someone who owned an apartment for rent, I would never do it again.  Our experience is not uncommon. It is also not as easy to find a good place as it used to be, possibly because, like you, the wet sand is becoming too much of a burden.

https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2022/09/08/immobilier-le-marche-de-la-location-se-tend_6140645_3224.html

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Norman, nice to hear from you again; I do hope the barrel has not been infested by worms or invested by strikers. How are takings in these difficult times?

Your health good?

I do take your point about renting but my cultural conditioning is such that I would feel chronically insecure if I did. Would be constantly worrying about being made homeless for whatever reason. And I would resent doing anything to the  place or the garden.

Do keep posting.

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Our first locataire was over 70 and we would have had her rent for ever, but unfortunately she died.  Her only failing was insisting to pay by cheque each month.  As they years passed, she increasingly forgot to sign them.  I took to doing it, which the bank never queried.

The second one was in her 60's, she died too.

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Norman, please do not rise to their baits or taunts😁

They are only jealous. 

Didn't you post a photo of your bijou pad recently?  The one with the impressive stone plague on the front which says "The renowned and sagacious Norman H lives here"?

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ssmomon, yes, he has mentioned before how pleased he is with his rented accommodation.  I was deliberately making out that that was his house, that we would all descend on him and he did have one of the flats in his block that was used as an AirBnB.

It's about as believable as the barrel that Wooly insists Norman lives in😃

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  • 1 month later...

Thank you Loiseau, Hectorsdad and others for your comments  / observations re the sale of my property.

Regarding transfer of funds - which may be quite a lot - it’s worth opening an account with more than one currency firm so that you can get get the rate of exchange for your transaction(s) from more than one firm,  compare them and select the best deal.  It’s also worth talking to a dealer as you can negotiate the best deal rather than purchasing sterling online.  In my own case I did several deals, almost always used the same firm as they consistently offered the better rate of exchange.

To illustrate this point, an anecdote. Years ago, when wanting to buy sterling with US dollars, Moneycorp (UK office) were able to give me a rate which was about £12000 better than a US bank would give me for buying sterling.

Moral:  specialist currency firms tend to give better rates than banks.

Several comments here about a “barrel” being a property.  What is a “barrel”?  I know the French term “barrak” which tends to be a  slang term for house / dwelling, may even be pejorative.

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